HowGood
Assembly Line
AI is touching your food—maybe most of it—by solving the food industry’s unique supply-chain challenges
Using AI to get your products from point A to point B is a growing solution to logistical hurdles, but in no other industry does it feel as nuanced as the food supply chain. That supply chain includes everything from natural agricultural and weather-related challenges to grow ingredients to inventory management and product shelf life: The end consumer needs that item to stay fresh long enough to cook it and eat it, be it at home or at a food service establishment.
Erik Nieves, cofounder and CEO of Plus One Robotics, explains, he has seen AI greatly reduce the time-to-shelf for several products. Part of that is with robotics, like his, that automate packaging systems in warehouses with the help of machine learning and 3D computer vision. The robots can hang out longer in a cold freezer to package temperature-controlled goods and also handle more manual labor than a human, even with a forklift. They are getting pretty good, he says, at detecting different types of fruit and adjusting their gripper strength to avoid bruising a ripe pear.
By analyzing historical sales data, AI is giving food distributors more insight into what is selling when—and informing its purchase orders accordingly. A 2022 study by the World Wildlife Fund found that AI software offered a 14.8% reduction in food waste per grocery store.